![]() In the mid-1960s, he produced the series “Suite of Twenty-Seven Lithographs” with the Paris-based Maeght Éditeur. A 1993 drawing of an oak leaf is clearly representational, but rendered with very minimal colour and line. Like his paintings, his drawings tend to be relatively flat in perspective, but they are rarely abstract. ![]() Kelly made drawings and prints throughout his career, using plants and flowers as his primary source of inspiration. A lithograph from the same period, Blue and Orange consists of two shapes in the title’s complementary colours facing off against one another with a tension that makes them appear almost animated. To explore this relationship between form and ground further, Kelly began using nontraditional, shaped canvases, as in the monochromatic 1966 Yellow Piece, from, whose two curved corners draws the eye to the wall behind it, as though the gallery wall itself were part of the composition. In one of his most famous works, 1963''s Red Blue Green, for example, two shapes, one red, one blue, both contrast and resonate with a green background that extends to the edge of the canvas on both sides, appearing at moments to be the work’s primary shape. Following an exhibition of his work at the Betty Parsons Gallery in 1956, Kelly’s work was included in the "Young America 1957” show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.ĭuring the 1960s, Kelly played with colour and form to tease out and celebrate the tension between a painting’s subject and its background. ![]() Like Stella, Kelly was interested in formal precision and explorations of colour. Upon his return to the United States, in 1954, he found himself at odds with the dominant style of the period, Abstract Expressionism, which favoured a dynamic and energetic application of paint in a loose manner. While in France, he immersed himself in the varied artistic movements and styles represented there and befriended Americans avant-gardists, such as composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham, as well as the German-French Surrealist Jean Arp and Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. ![]() Bill to study painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, drawing inspiration from the museum''s collections, and, later, at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, in Paris. When the war was over, Kelly took advantage of the G.I. During World War II, he served along with scores of other artists, in a unit known as the Ghost Army, where he learnt the elements of camouflage while creating ersatz trucks and tanks intended to mislead Axis forces. Encouraged to study art by a high school teacher, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, remaining there until 1943, when he was inducted into the army. He was an avid birder as a child and loved the colourful illustrations of naturalist John James Audubon. Kelly grew up in the town of Newburgh, New York, near the Oradell Reservoir. Kelly''s works, both two- and three-dimensional, are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and displayed at such sites as the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Although highly abstract, Kelly’s paintings and prints are precise expressions in colour and form of his sensory experience of the world. Widely known for his brightly coloured geometric compositions, he was among the first artists, alongside his contemporary Frank Stella, to use irregularly shaped canvases. Ellsworth Kelly was one of the key figures in postwar American art, exercising major influence on the fields of Pop art, minimalism, Colour-Field and hard-edge painting.
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